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did they come from?"
    "My father. He owned an antique shop in addition to his investments. Here's the library."
    The walls were lined with floor-to-ceiling bookcases. One of these had been appropriated for Margaret's collection of single human figures (dancers, soldiers, circus performers, map sellers, slaves, kings, musicians, and two entire commedia dell'arte troupes); the other cases were full of books. Most of them were related to art and art history, antiques, ceramics and porcelain, fine furniture. There were classic works of fiction as well (Dickens, the Bronte girls, Thomas Hardy) and another large nonfiction section was devoted mostly to World War II, religion, and European history.
    "I hope you like to read," Margaret had said, completely without irony. "I would want whoever takes the room to feel free to borrow anything from the library, anytime."
    The downstairs guest quarters, which Margaret referred to as "the Aviary Suite," housed porcelain birds: swans, peacocks, geese, quail, pheasant, parakeets, falcons, ducks, and a single golden eagle. Each of the upstairs bedrooms, too, were identified by their contents: the Bonbon Dish Room, the Smoke and Snuff Room, the Game Pie Tureen Room, and so on. Margaret's room was full of porcelain children. The room that would be Wanda's displayed glossy pyramids of vividly colored food.
    What struck Wanda as even stranger than the volume of Margaret's possessions was the laconic way in which she described them, the obvious lack of pleasure she took in being their owner. Wanda noticed that certain names {Factory names, maybe? Manufacturers?) came up again and again: Capodimonte, Meissen, Popov, Sevres, Vincennes. She memorized bits of new terminology: soft-paste, hard-paste, biscuit-ware, majolica.
    "Maybe you can tell me," Wanda ventured. "I've never really known what porcelain is exactly, what makes it prized."
    Margaret answered in her odd, emotionless manner. "It's won where found."
    "What does that mean?"
    "There are two general categories of clay. Primary or residual clay is 'won'—retrieved—from the same place on earth where it was formed, thousands of years ago."
    "And that's an advantage?"
    "Primary clay—like china, from which porcelain is made—has never been transported from its original site, so it's very pure. Some people value that sort of thing."
    They had arrived at the end of the tour and were on the third-floor ballroom, where a vast collection of ornate candleholders was exhibited.
    "What's the other category ?" Wanda was less interested in clay at this point than in Margaret's manner of response. How could she know so much about this stuff and care so little?
    "Secondary or sedimentary clays. They travel." Finally Margaret stopped sounding like a bad recording of a boring textbook. "For centuries, they travel. Carried along by wind, rain, ice. They're won thousands of miles from where they were initially formed."
    "So they're less pure."
    "Yes. But because they've been buffeted about for such a long time, they're composed of smaller particles."
    "And that's good because—?"
    "Smaller particle size means greater plasticity. On the other hand, china clay—being composed of large particles—is more rigid, harder to work with."
    "Ah. It suffers no fools." Wanda meant it as a joke, but Margaret looked so startled and tense that she feared she'd offended her.
    Margaret turned away. "That's it, then. That's the whole house." She began moving through the ballroom, turning off the chandeliers and wall sconces. Her footsteps were heavy on the oak planks of the ballroom floor, their returning echoes even heavier. "Let's go downstairs."
    Wanda asked no further questions, certainly not the one which had been at the forefront of her mind: Fifteen thousand square feet? Eleven bedrooms? And you live here alone?
    Wanda took another sip of cold coffee and studied her city map and bus schedules. Getting to Margaret's by bus was not going to be easy or quick; she'd have